The Best Cookbooks of 2024, According to Food & Wine Editors

Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking

Islas: A Celebration of Tropical Cooking

$35 $23 at Amazon

Von Diaz's new book looks like it was modeled after my dream vacation. Diaz researched and traveled to islands from the Caribbean to the African and Indian coasts to meet the people who live and cook in these places, calling them “the toughest, scrappiest, most resilient people on this planet.” In her book, she showcases their recipes, shares their stories, and guides the reader through deep dives into ingredients like coconut, rice, and banana leaves that are commonly used in island cooking around the world. Diaz, who was born in Puerto Rico, is unafraid to address how climate change and food scarcity impact the cuisines featured in this book, making it both educational and a culinary delight. — Chandra Ram, Associate Editorial Director, Food

Bayou: Feasting Through Seasons of a Cajun Life

Bayou

$35 $30 at Amazon

Seasons shape the order of this book, the second from James Beard Award–winner Melissa Martin, but not the way you think. “The seasons in Louisiana are not necessarily summer, fall, winter, and spring,” she writes, explaining that they are more granular: times of feast and fasting, an interplay of culture and availability. Raised in a Cajun family in southern Louisiana, where the coast is a lace of silt and water, Martin focuses on local ingredients: seafood but also pecans, sugarcane, and even sassafras, from which filé powder can be ground. There are recipes for homemade boudin, king cake, and gumbos (multiple), but also for a fried potato sandwich and satsuma sorbet. Tradition and innovation, like Carnival and Lent, sit comfortably (and deliciously) side by side. — Molly McArdle

Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes: 100 Easy-Peasy, Savory Recipes for 24/7 Deliciousness

Salty, Cheesy, Herby, Crispy Snackable Bakes

$28 $25 at Amazon

Acclaimed cookbook author and social media star Jessie Sheehan offers 100 savory, “easy-peasy” recipes in a follow-up to her celebrated 2022 cookbook, Snackable Bakes. Single-bowl recipes, quick preparation times, and easy-to-find ingredients are Sheehan’s signatures, and she brings these tenets to recipes that sit comfortably in the middle of a “comfort food” and “social media-friendly” Venn diagram. Embrace the pepperoni “pizza” galettes, grilled cheese sandwich tarts, and “BLT” scones made with bacon, lemon, and sun-dried tomato. Sheehan’s personality, both fun and reliable, shines through this book: one chapter is titled “Breads You Need…But Don’t Knead (Hee Hee Hee). — MM

Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store

Bodega Bakes

$35 $28 at Amazon

Look, Paola Velez is a food world rock star. (We’ve been saying so since even before 2021, when we named her a F&W Best New Chef.) The Bronx native, now based in D.C., put in time with Jacques Torres and Milkbar (Christina Tosi writes the foreword) before opening her pandemic-era Doña Dona pop-up and cofounding Bakers Against Racism, which raised nearly $2 million for social justice organizations across the country. Her first cookbook is an ode to the New York City bodegas that nurtured her palate. For Velez, these are magic places, culinary and human crossroads where you can meet a friendly cat and pick up a single overpriced roll of toilet paper while also finding killer flan, a sleeve of Maria cookies, and a five-cent Warhead. Velez translates this sense of wonder into her own intensely flavored — and often brightly colored — cookies, bars, pies, cakes, rolls, flans, and frozen treats; roll up for Guava & Cheese Cookies, Dulce de Leche Babka, and Hibiscus-Pineapple Sorbet — MM

The Bartender's Pantry

The Bartender’s Pantry

$35 $21 at Amazon

These days many bartenders think like chefs — and like the best chefs, the best bartenders care about quality ingredients. That’s the idea behind this new release from New York City bar veteran Jim Meehan, with help from designer Bart Sasso and journalist Emma Janzen. The book is divided into non-alcoholic ingredient “families” that include sugar; spices; dairy; nuts and grains; veggies, flowers, and herbs; fruit; coffee; tea; soda; and ferments. Each chapter includes tips on ethical sourcing, storage, and preparation, plus plenty of recipes.

These include ingredients for your own pantry like Lior Lev Sercarz’s Bloody Mary spice blend and chef Wylie Dufresne’s “corn water,” as well as cocktails. While Meehan contributed drinks like a Masala Chai Milk Punch, he also turned to legendary peers like Don Lee, Lynette Marrero, and Masahiro “Masa” Urushido for the wide-ranging collection. — Audrey Morgan, Senior Editor

Koreaworld

Koreaworld

$35 $26 at Amazon

There’s an unbridled sense of joy about Koreaworld, and not just because the book has a recipe for Cheesy Corndogs, a Grilled Kimchi Wedge Salad, and Taco Bell Bibimbap. As someone who’s loved watching New York City’s Korean food scene explode over the past few years, I can’t wait to make my way through Deuki Hong and Matt Rodbard’s ode to food found in Korea, as well as in Koreatowns around the world. The book also features thoughtful conversations with chefs like 2021 F&W Best New Chef Angel Barretto and 2020 F&W Best New Chef Eunjo Park. First on my list of recipes to try? Kimchi-Braised Short Rib Papardelle and Gilgegori Toast. – Oset Babür-Winter, former Senior Drinks Editor

The SalviSoul Cookbook

The SalviSoul Cookbook

$35 $22 at Amazon

Karla T. Vasquez is a trusted member of our F&W Cooks family, and this ode to Salvadoran cooking doesn't disappoint. If the introduction alone isn't enough to make you misty-eyed, each recipe draws you into a rich history of Salvadoran culture, while Karla's poetically written headnotes give you a true sense of time and place. It's a fantastic read for anyone who has ever felt a wave of homesickness and yearns for the comfort food and family bring. — Andee Gosnell, Assistant Food Editor

Chinese Enough: Homestyle Recipes for Noodles, Dumplings, Stir-Fries, and More

Chinese Enough

$35 $27 at Amazon

Midwest-raised, Bay Area–based, first-generation Chinese American Kristina Cho brings her multi-hyphenate identity to the forefront in her second cookbook. It’s a defining statement of her style of cooking: “distinctly Chinese, with generous Midwestern hospitality and practicality, and a sunny Californian approach to ingredients.” The author of one of the first substantive English-language cookbooks to cover Chinese baking (Mooncakes and Milk Bread) now turns to savory dishes like tomato egg, bahn mi pasta salad, her family’s recipe for dumpling, and a smashed potato dish she calls “Tingly Taters.” This book could also be called Plenty Delicious. — MM

Zoë Bakes Cookies: Everything You Need to Know to Make Your Favorite Cookies and Bars

Zoë Bakes Cookies

$30 $21 at Amazon

It’s little surprise that the latest book by the prolific and popular Zoë François is already a bestseller. This tribute to cookies is François’s second solo cookbook, after Zoë Bakes Cakes, and her tenth cookbook overall. (She cowrote the other eight cookbooks — from The Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book series — with Jeff Hertzberg. Collectively, they’ve sold over a million copies.) François groups her recipe by themes, locations, and occasions that are also rooted in her own biography: healthy cookies connect back to her Vermont commune childhood (with two kinds of granola and three kinds of oatmeal cookies), while categories of both Christmas and Jewish cookies pay homage to two different grandmothers. Sections dedicated to ingredients as well as a “Cookie Academy” are rich with detail and extraordinarily helpful. Best perhaps is her Chocolate Cookie Lab, where cookies photographed along a spectrum show how more or less of a single ingredient impacts the overall bake. — MM

Persian Feasts

Persian Feasts

$50 $39 at Amazon

My husband was born in Tehran and the first dish he cooked for me when we were dating was lamb fesenjan. I've been cooking out of old Persian cookbooks for a while and I love the way Persian Feasts by Leila Heller is presented. The photos, recipes, stories, and translations emphasize the personal stories behind each recipe and make you feel like you are cooking with Heller, her mother, and the other female contributors. Heller is the president of an art gallery and the book feels like an artistic masterpiece. It's as beautiful to look at as it is to cook from. — Breana Killeen, Senior Food Editor

Justine Cooks: Recipes (Mostly Plants) for Finding Your Way in the Kitchen

Justine Cooks

$35 $27 at Amazon

You may have first heard about Justine Doiron a couple of years ago, when her decorative butter boards hit every part of your social media feed. But Doiron has become a go-to source for her plant-forward and pescatarian recipes. Her book includes plenty of creative bowls, mains, and sides that rely on punchy, bright flavors, like kimchi-crusted eggs, lime-roasted cabbage with turmeric white bean mash, and whitefish peperonata. Recipes like her shatter top cauliflower orzo, in which the soft, creamy pasta is topped with a crispy Parmesan frico, show off her love of crunchy contrasting flavor. This is a great book for meals that are impressive and accessible. — CR

Afri-Cali: Recipes from My Jikoni (A Cookbook)

AfriCali

$35 $22 at Amazon

There’s a little bit of everything in Afri-Cali. You’ll find dishes like a Nigerian-style kale stew thickened with egusi (ground melon seeds), braised pork tacos flavored with Ethiopian berbere spice mix, a version of French classic pommes Anna kicked up with cheese and chile peppers, and a sticky toffee pudding inspired by South African favorite malva pudding. It’s a tribute to the global influences of author Kiano Moju, who grew up in Oakland, California, with a Kenyan mother and Nigerian father, then went to college in London. My favorite recipe so far is the spatchcocked roast chicken with poisson sauce, a spiced-and-spicy mix of butter, garlic, ginger, chile powder, and lemon. Hold onto the extra sauce to pour it over veggies! — Jason Horn, Senior Update Commerce Editor 

Mastering The Art Of Plant-Based Cooking: Vegan Recipes, Tips, and Techniques

Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking

$50 $36 at Amazon

Plant-based eating is old news. Foregrounding the long history and widespread practice of eating a diet without animals, Joe Yonan’s fourth cookbook is expansive and encyclopedic, at 500 pages and filled with more than 300 recipes. “My goal here,” the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post food editor writes, “is to provide you with as vibrant a spectrum of plant-based possibilities as I could imagine.” Contributors add recipes and some short essays to the mix. In what is perhaps the first vegan cookbook to have this wide a remit, you’ll find nearly everything here: building blocks like stocks and butters and milks; basics like pesto and pancakes and tempeh and tofu scrambles; and dishes meant for center stage like eggplant rollatini and whole roasted beets with mole and hariyali jackfruit biryani. — MM

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens

$40 $34 at Amazon

In Ashleigh Shanti’s first cookbook, the chef and owner of the lauded Asheville restaurant Good Hot Fish traces the contours of her south: tidewater Virginia, the Appalachian mountains and rivers of Virginia and North Carolina, and the sea islands of Georgia and South Carolina, as well as the midlands hammocked between these peaks and shores. This book is a celebration of these places and their keenly attuned food traditions: backcountry chow chow and britches (or dried green beans), Lowcountry stewed peanut chicken with shrimp rice, midlands peach shortcake, lowlands (or tidewater) Brunswick stew, hot boiled peanuts, deep-fried hard-shell crabs, and a local American Chinese noodle dish called yock, which Shanti attempts to reproduce. (“There simply is no other way to make yock,” she writes. “Ketchup and spaghetti are the way, the truth, and the light.”) It’s also a reclamation of foods and traditions (yock included) that Shanti only came to investigate — and properly value — later in life. What’s most important, she declares, is that “I’ll share my own story: that of a chef who is no longer pretending to be anyone but herself.” — MM

Hot Sheet: Sweet and Savory Sheet Pan Recipes for Every Day and Celebrations

Hot Sheet

$33 $28 at Amazon

Before you say "Oh great, another sheet pan cookbook," hear us out. With more than 100 refreshing recipes, authors Olga Massov and Sanaë Lemoine's Hot Sheet open up bold new dish possibilities while kindly silencing naysayers who wrote off sheet pan cooking as a gimmicky hack. This book has something for everyone, but is especially useful for entertaining aficionados who are tired of believing the singular path to achieving wow-worthy dishes is through expensive cooking equipment. Think you can't roast a whole duck on a sheet pan? You can with this book. Sheet pan ramen? Tell us more. Massov and Lemoine also make room for the classics like quesadillas and roast chicken with vegetables. After reading this book, your imagination will run wild the next time you're staring at your sheet pan and asking yourself what to make. — AG

Breaking Bao: 88 Bakes and Snacks from Asia and Beyond

Breaking Bao

$40 $34 at Amazon

In Chinese culture, 88 is a lucky number, signifying good luck and wealth. And what could be more fortunate than a debut cookbook from Clarice Lam? The former pastry chef at Kimika, the Japanese-Italian restaurant in New York named a James Beard semi-finalist for Best New Restaurant in 2022, Lam’s default setting as a baker is hybridity. Pulling together techniques from European baking traditions and flavors from East and Southeast Asia, she offers up recipes like Pork Floss and Scallion Focaccia and Thai Tea Gelati. And she didn’t forget the bao, of which there are nine versions. These steamed buns are filled with dan dan; sweet corn custard; Chinese bacon, egg, and chives; sweet black sesame paste; and more creative fillings. Lucky us, indeed. — MM